Here’s a great way to look at your computer security situation when you compare Windows against the Mac. You could consider the Windows platform to be like an urban house in Queens in New York City, and you could consider the Macintosh platform to be like a house in rural Connecticut. Even if both houses had the same level of security installed, the New York house would get burglarized a lot more often than the one in rural Connecticut. It’s just the environment they are in. Get the best antivirus for Mac and get the best antivirus for Windows. No matter what technology it is, someone’s going to find a way to break it.

Windows (Windows 7 at least) happens to be in a bad neighborhood. That’s all (or nearly so). If the Macintosh had one million people employed full-time in breaking its defenses down, who knows where we would be today?

Thankfully, that’s not the position we find ourselves in. Right now, you have two choices – you could either buy the best antivirus for Mac and rest easy allowing it to take care of your Mac for you, or you could learn the following practices when using your Mac. These won’t afford you the same level of protection that antivirus can of course, but they should be the next best thing.

Here is the simplest thing you can do to protect your Macintosh from malware attacks – do most of your everyday computing work on a user account that doesn’t have administrator privileges. If you’re just surfing the web, answering your e-mail and so on, use that non-admin account for it. This account shouldn’t have any sensitive credit card or other financial information that malware could steal.

As easy as it can be to ignore password protection for your Mac, make sure that you set things up so that your computer always requires a name and password for you to enter. All you need to do is to go to Login options and turn Automatic login off.

It also makes a lot of sense to disable location services and your infrared receiver. To going even further, turn your IPv6 off. You’ll find it if you go to Preferences, Network, and then to click on Advanced for each network interface, to go to the TCP/IP tab.

Not much malware out there is clever enough to get past a password demanding screen. To protect your computer even further, make sure of both the following:

Make sure that Allow Guests to log in to this computer and Allow guests to connect to shared folders are unchecked.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to set your security preferences such that the computer needs a password to let you in after it’s been put to sleep or after the screensaver has come on.

Of course, these are not going to help you against the likes of the MacDefender virus. For most everyday situations though, these will be a great help.